Linguistic Segregation in the United States, 1900-1930

Evan Roberts, University of Minnesota
Isabella Ou, University of Minnesota

While racial and ethnic-origin segregation has been extensively studied in the United States, there is no prior research on how Americans were segregated by language use. While most Americans spoke English in the early twentieth century, in some areas of the country significant minorities did not. Prior to the restriction of immigration in 1924, there was significant concern and political debate about immigrants and their descendents who did not speak English, with repeated attempts to impose a ban on the ban of non-English-speakers. In this paper we use new microdata of the complete United States census between 1900 and 1930, and standard measures of segregation at varying geographic levels to measure whether non-English speakers clustered together, and how segregation changed over 30 years. We investigate how much linguistic segregation was associated with congressional votes on English-language clauses in the Immigration Act. Although only a small minority of the population did not speak English, the share of the foreign-born population who did not speak English was significant ranging from 11 to 23% between 1900 and 1920. We find that the non-English speaking population was, in general, highly clustered spatially. Non-English speakers were unevenly distributed across cities and counties, and more unevenly distributed than the foreign-born in general. At the micro-spatial level we see evidence of non-English speakers tending to have non-English speaking neighbors, whether measured within the nearest 5-10 houses or considering only those immediately adjacent. These spatial characteristics contributed to the non-English speaking minority appearing more significant in size and cultural difference than their actual numbers allowed. The Congressional debate on language requirements for immigrants was shaped by the spatial characteristics of where speakers other languages lived.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 181. Urban Families